Exseed Sat 1 India's first private satellite.

Exseed Sat 1 was built from scratch in four months. Ten years earlier, a satellite of the same complexity would have weighed 100 kg and cost about $100 million. Exseed Sat 1 weighs under a kilogram and cost under $500,000 to build and qualify — the result of a decade of progress in low-power electronics, and a generation of new launch providers competing for ride-share slots.

The mission extends ordinary amateur-radio walkie-talkies across hundreds of kilometres — useful from Everest climbers and offshore sailors to civil-defence and small-boat tracking. It flies at roughly 600 km in a polar orbit, traversing New York to Hyderabad in under an hour at 28,800 km/h.

Onboard, solar panels charge the batteries that keep the radios alive when the spacecraft is in shadow. Temperatures swing from +100 °C in sunlight to −60 °C in the dark; the on-board computer was hardened in software so a stray cosmic ray could not put it in a coma. The radios were developed and tuned with HF Signals in Hyderabad. The pure-silver inductor wires were drawn by Azhar Jawaharat-ul Osman, a traditional jeweller and his karigars in Abids, Hyderabad — better than anything we sourced commercially.

On 3 December 2018, Falcon 9 lifted off from Vandenberg with Exseed Sat 1 riding ride-share alongside AMSAT-NA's Fox-1E. Both deployed simultaneously. The spacecraft began whistling out the letter “V” in Morse code — Beethoven's fifth — followed by RTTY telemetry, every minute, for the rest of its operational life.